An efficient equalizer for the impulsive noise environment

Abstract

In some communication systems, the transmitted signal is contaminated by impulsive noise with a non-Gaussian distribution, which usually causes significant performance degradation to communication receivers. To deal with the impulsive noise, this paper proposes an efficient equalizer based on new fractional lower-order statistic (FLOS). Firstly, a nonlinear function-based new FLOS associated with the linear equalizer is designed to decrease the influence of impulsive noise. Secondly, referring to minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion, an unconstrained optimization problem is formulated, and it is solved by the gradient descent method. Thirdly, to further improve the robustness of the proposed algorithm, the gradient is normalized by the l∞-norm of the equalizer input vector. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves superior performance under Gaussian noise, even in the case of strong impulsive noise. Also, the simulation results prove the rationality of the new statistics under impulsive noise environments.